An international consortium of scientists co-led by Professor Robinson is proposing a massive project to sequence, catalog and analyze the genomes of all known eukaryotic species on the planet, an undertaking the researchers say will take 10 years, cost $4.7 billion and require more than 200 petabytes of digital storage capacity. Eukaryotes include all organisms except bacteria and archaea. There are an estimated 10-15 million eukaryotic species on Earth. Of those, the team proposes sequencing 1.5 million.
Gene E. Robinson holds a University Swanlund Chair and is also the director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and director of the Bee Research Facility. He served as director of the Neuroscience Program from 2001-2011, leader of the Neural and Behavioral Plasticity Theme at the Institute for Genomic Biology from 2004-2011, and interim director from 2011-2012. He is the author or co-author of over 300 publications, including 26 published in Science or Nature; has been the recipient or co-recipient of over $60M in funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Agriculture and private foundations; pioneered the application of genomics to the study of social behavior, led the effort to gain approval from the National Institutes of Health for sequencing the honey bee genome, and heads the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Consortium.
